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A comment on Why OO Sucks. Parent comment

Re:Why OO Sucks by visitor4rmindia on Tuesday February 10, 2009 @07:29AM (#475071)
Let me try and give an example. Let's assume we are modelling a non-leaf node which contains long keys and long offsets. We can do it in any of the following ways:

    |offset0|key1|offset1|key2|offset2|key3|offset3......|
OR

    |key1|key2|key3...|offset0|offset1|offset2|offset3...|
OR

    |offset0|offset1|offset2|offset3...|key1|key2|key3...|
OR

    |count|key3|key1|key7...|offset0|offset1|offset2.....| <== Binary search-able keys
In all of these cases, the data structure is different but the basic B-Tree algorithm remains the same. You can implement the algorithm once (using templates (C++), macros (C), or a weakly typed language (Lisp/Scheme)) and re-use it with any and all data structures that come up later.

EDIT: Forgot offset0

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Re:Why OO Sucks by schtog on Tuesday February 10, 2009 @09:32AM (#475173)
how is Lisp/Scheme weakly typed? It is dynamically typed and strongly too(even though the strong/weak typing definition isn't exactly clear).
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Re:Why OO Sucks by visitor4rmindia on Tuesday February 10, 2009 @10:03AM (#475213)
I'm sorry. You're right - that was a slip-up. I meant a non-static (dynamic) typed language.
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Re:Why OO Sucks by ricky_clarkson on Tuesday February 10, 2009 @10:08AM (#475222)
Lisp/Scheme are untyped.
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Re:Why OO Sucks by Hexstream on Tuesday February 10, 2009 @11:50AM (#475430)
No, they're duck-typed. Types are attached to values, not variables, and for example trying to eval (+ 1 "hi") will throw a proper type exception.

You usually don't have to declare types but for example in Common Lisp you can optionally declare types for better performance in speed-critical parts of the code.

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Re:Why OO Sucks by ricky_clarkson on Wednesday February 11, 2009 @06:22AM (#476868)
They're an implementation of the untyped lambda calculus. What you're thinking of are better named tags, not types.
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